Locals

According to the city’s prevailing culinary wisdom, eating local is the highest good. If your turnip greens weren’t harvested from a rooftop in Astoria, you might as well eat a McRib. When it comes to seafood, however, there is such a thing as too close. “You tell people you’re going fishing up in Greenpoint and you get this look of disgust,” Michael Louie said recently, at a party full of urban angling enthusiasts. Louie, a thirty-three-year-old zine editor, was an organizer of the recent Brooklyn Fishing Derby, an annual tournament in which prizes are awarded for the biggest striped bass and the biggest bluefish caught off the eastern shore of the East River, between Red Hook and Long Island City—no boats allowed. The river is cleaner now than it has been in decades, Louie said. Since the derby’s start, in October, he had landed some thirty fish, only one of which looked toxic. “It had a weird sore on its tail,” he said. “I was going to throw it back, but somebody else said, ‘Oh, I’ll take it.’ ”

The derby was the brainchild of Benjamin Sargent, the proprietor of an unlicensed lobster-roll outfit that ran afoul of the city’s health authorities last year. (For fourteen dollars, Sargent, who is known as Dr. Claw or the Chowder Surfer, would dress as a drug pusher and deliver a homemade lobster roll to your door.) His latest venture is a Cooking Channel program called “Hook, Line, and Dinner,” whose première was the occasion for the party, held on the terrace of a Chinese bistro in Williamsburg. Tarps had been stretched across the patio to keep out the rain, but guests huddled around space heaters, picking with chopsticks at trays of steamed, non-local snapper. Waitresses scurried around like deckhands, mopping up puddles.

Sargent likes to refer to the derby as “the common man’s fishing competition,” both because of the boat prohibition and because he views it as a benevolent way to unite various factions of the local population—“old Italian guys, sons of police officers, the Williamsburg hipster crew.” (The last demographic was the most heavily represented on the patio.) Recently, though, the alliance had turned fractious. When the derby’s blog announced a new leader in the striped-bass division—photos showed a burly middle-aged man named Yan Gorz hoisting a 42.75-inch, 25.5-pound fish—participants cried foul. At issue was not whether Gorz, a roofer from Poland, had actually caught the fish but when he had caught it. “NOT COOL!!!!……..an investigation should be launched,” one fisherman posted. A number of party guests seemed to agree. Sargent wasn’t eager to discuss the matter. “It makes it look like we’re running a really haphazard derby,” he said.

Over a Heineken, Louie filled in the details. According to the detractors, a Greenpoint tackle-shop owner who’d been deputized to register new derby competitors had allowed Gorz to sign up the day after his enormous catch, in violation of the tournament bylaws. “No fishing derby allows that anywhere,” Louie said. “It’s just illegal.” (The shop owner, Robert Piskorski, reached by phone, insisted that he’d done nothing wrong: “I was on a trip in Poland for five weeks. I came back, he signed up, and the next day he brought the fish here. The fish was dead, so, I mean, as far as me determining whether he caught it before, after, whatever—I don’t know.”) Louie was gloomy about the prospect of anyone besting Gorz; at that point the second-biggest fish was more than seven inches shorter. “Maybe out in Montauk it wouldn’t be considered a monster,” he said. For the East River, though, it was practically Moby-Dick.

Fishing may be a sport of fibbers, but the derby’s organizers were serious about the integrity of the contest. James Potter, a surfing buddy of Sargent’s and another derby organizer, said that an investigation was under way. “We are collecting evidence and talking to eyewitnesses,” he said. “Worst-case scenario, we have a polygraph.” Among other complicating factors, Gorz speaks very little English.

A week later, the questionable catch was unanimously nixed by the organizing committee. The rationale did not seem entirely clear to Gorz, who later explained, in halting sentences, that the quarrel was about whether or not he had employed a boat. (He had not.) There could be no misunderstanding the derby’s outcome, however: Gorz went on to catch an indisputably legal forty-four-inch bass, earning the first-place prize of five hundred dollars, presented on a giant, sweepstakes-worthy check. He pledged his winnings to a school for sick children in Poland. As for the Brobdingnagian bass, it had been donated to a friend. “I never no eat fish,” he said. “Only for Christmas, little, little bit for my religion.” ♦